Why Experience Is Expensive – And How Business Simulations Accelerate Commercial Judgement

At school, I knew what tomorrow’s lessons were going to be. Wednesday morning might have been Shakespeare, Trigonometry and Oxbow Lakes. And then a test (or exam) would show to what extent I’d understood and could remember the knowledge I’d been given.

In business, nobody tells you if there will be a lesson tomorrow, we just have to wait and see what happens. An important customer moves to a competitor, a project succeeds, an investment disappoints, or perhaps a difficult decision turns out better than we expected.

The learning comes afterwards… if we're prepared to reflect on what happened and why, and only then, if we can link the cause and effect to form a conclusion that will help us.

Our experiences alone don't develop judgement. The consequences of the experiences and our ability to reflect on them do. The lessons that stay with us are often the ones that we felt most deeply. The failures we could have avoided, the trade-offs that in the moment seemed impossible to resolve and the big disappointments have a habit of teaching us things we'll never forget. The trouble is that, in the real world, those lessons can be painfully expensive.

This is where simulation helps.

Business simulations allow people to experience pressure, to make decisions and see the consequences of what they do (or don’t do!) in a safe environment. Participants cycle through thinking about their decisions and feeling the consequences and so build mental models of their commercial world.

They still develop experience, but they buy that experience at a discount. In a simulated environment, you still compete with and against your peers. The emotions are the same, but customers aren’t really lost. Reputations aren’t really damaged and no-ones business fails for real.

Good judgement is rarely taught. More often, it's earned. Simulation simply provides a safer, faster and less expensive way to earn it.